Categorie: Windows 10 IoT Core

I bet, most of the time you have seen Azure IoT demos or most of the time you have programmed an IoT Uwp app yourself, you hard coded device credentials for the IoT hub. Yes, I’m guilty too 🙂

And this is, of course, a bad practice.

Not only, there is a risk these credentials are shared by checking them in into your version control system (like public Git). But it’s also inconvenient because, for each device running that production code, you will have to alter the credentials in the code and deploy again.

We could use configuration files. But this is still worthless in perspective of distribution.

We would like to pass the credentials to known devices separately, apart from the applications. We want to use a second channel. And this is possible with the current Windows IoT Core infrastructure.

Microsoft is constantly updating its latest version of Windows, version 10. For me, as a developer, it’s a wonderful operating system to program for. The UWP apps I build, run on both PC’s, laptops, Windows Surface Hub (up to 84 inches), The Xbox One and even on a Raspberry Pi. Yes, Windows 10 is running on a 35 dollar device.

But before you run to the store to replace your PC, I have to tell you it’s running the core of Windows 10, actually. There is no shell (no menu, no start bar etc.).

So this means you can run one visual (headed) UWP application and multiple background applications. And yes, you will love it!

This is a great interface for kiosk-like devices. And with the latest update (build 15063), it’s easy to add Cortana support.

Cortana is the speech service, available in Windows 10. If you know Siri or Alexa, then you know Cortana. Just ask her a question and she will try to answer it. The answer will be provided by speech or supported by browsers or other visual help.

The RaspberryPi is running the core of Windows 10. This means that everything, not needed for running one app at a time, is left out of Windows 10. And with one app I mean, one visual app.

Until now I have always build a Windows UWP app to run something on the RaspberryPi. And the fact it has a form which can represent visual elements in XAML, it gives away that it is a visual app. These kind of apps are running in headed mode.

But running one visual app, taking the whole screen occupied in headed mode, does not prevent the OS from running multiple background processes in headless mode.